Sulphur Springs
	The Sulphur Springs pool was a wonderful place to go swimming during the summer. It's closed now but during the fifties it was like Coney Island. Many hundreds of people! Those were carefree days that seemed timeless, but much has changed since then. Even the candy is different. When you heard the National Anthem sung back then at a ball game it didn't sound like the singer had just swallowed a handful of Mexican jumping beans. You'd hear everyday phrases like, "Let's hit the flicks," and "Let me bum a fag off of you," meaning "Let's go to the movies," and "Lend me a cigarette." Most people don't know that the word faggot means a bundle of sticks to burn, hence cigarettes. By the way, you see these bundles of wood every day on our dimes and there's one on either side of the front of Abraham Lincoln's chair in his statue at the Lincoln Memorial. It indicated that during the beginning of our country we had the ability to keep our homes warm. Prior to that, in England, all the wealthy had house boys who took care of the household chores. Their main duty was to bring in the faggots of wood and keep the fireplace supplied. They were called faggot boys. There were a lot of "cool cats" at the Sulphur Springs pool. Most of them had fuzzy dice hanging from the rear view mirrors of their cars. The movie idols were Elvis Presley, James Dean, and Natalie Wood. The lifeguard there on the weekends, who was the center of attention and kept everything in line, was K.T. I had no idea that years later he'd be my boss at Busch Gardens. We went to Sulphur Springs every weekend in the summer. It was about six miles from our neighborhood on Ellicott Street. We'd walk it and thought nothing of it, leaving before the sun was high and the streets were too hot on our bare feet. Going home was a different procedure. The streets were usually frying pan hot. But we had a system. We'd throw our wet bathing suits as far as we could then run as fast as we could and stand on them. I'm surprised you couldn't hear the hissing of steam combined with our sighs of relief. By the time we got home the bathing suits were barely damp and almost as hot as the street. On rare occasions our mother or dad would drive us to the Sulphur Springs pool and drop us off. If we knew they were also going to pick us up, sometimes we'd take several inner tubes with us. You don't see inner tubes much any more, especially the red ones. We loved floating down the wide creek that went from the spring and flowed into the Hillsborough River near the tall Sulphur Springs tower that looked, and still does look, like a medieval castle tower. One day my mother came to pick us up. The admission desk was right inside the front door. Being a little white-haired lady that hadn't been there before, she wasn't familiar with the building. In order to get to the pool and beach you had to walk through the locker room that had showers and lockers and many naked people. The women's locker room was to the right and the men's was to the left. You guessed it. She went the wrong way and found herself right in the middle of the men's locker room and showers. She heard a woman's voice yelling from outside at the entrance door, "No! No! Lady! That's the Men's! Here's the Ladies'!" She managed to make her way back out trying to keep her eyes down, using one hand as a blinder, and her other hand stretched out in front of her so she wouldn't bump into the walls. She said, "That's an experience I'll never forget." I bet not. Lash Out Loud